A rider had his choice in journeying to Canyon Pass from a southerly direction – say from Lamberton, which lies between the railroad and the desert – of following the river trail to be deafened by the boisterous voice of the flood, or of climbing to the high lands and there jogging along the wagon track which finally dipped down the steeps to the ford of the West Fork and so into the mining town.
Spring was drifting into the background of the year. The cottonwood leaves were the size of squirrel ears. The new fronds of the piñon had expanded to full size and now their needles quivered in the heat of the almost summer-like day. Joe Hurley, sitting his heavy-haunched bay, giving as easily to the animal’s paces as a sack of meal, followed the wagon track rather than the river trail and so came to that fork where wheel-ruts from a westerly direction joined the road along the brink of the canyon wall.
A cream-colored pony came cantering along the trail from Hoskins, its rider as gaily dressed as a Mexican vaquero – a splotch of color against the background of the evergreens almost startling to his vision. But it was the identity of this rider that invigorated the tone of the mining man’s reflections.
“Nell Blossom! The only sure-enough cure for ophthalmia! Am I going to have the pleasure of being your escort back to Canyon Pass? It will sure do me proud. The Passonians are honing for you, Nell.”
“I’m going back to the Pass – yes, Mr. Hurley,” she said, pulling down her pony to the more sedate pace of his big bay.
“Where you been since you left us all in the lurch? There was almost a riot at the Grub Stake when Tolley found out you had gone.”
“Boss Tolley hasn’t got anything on me,” she said defensively. “I’d never sing there again, anyway.”
“Somebody said you’d lit out for the desert with Steve Siebert and Andy McCann,” and he chuckled. “They started the same day you vamoosed.”
“I might just as well have gone with those old desert rats. Pocket hunting couldn’t be much worse than Hoskins.”
“Great saltpeter! What took you to Hoskins?” exclaimed Hurley. “Where’s your local pride? If you weren’t born at Canyon Pass, you’ve lived there most of your life. You shouldn’t encourage a dump like Hoskins to believe for a moment that it has greater attractions than the Pass.”
“If I thought it might be more attractive, I learned better,” she said shortly.
“Mother Tubbs got a letter from you, but she wouldn’t tell us where you were.”
“No,” Nell said. “I didn’t want the boys riding over there and starting a roughhouse at the Tin Can Saloon.”
“Great saltpeter!” exclaimed Hurley again. “You don’t mean to say you been caroling your roundelays in that place?”
“A girl has to work somewhere, and I was sick to death of the Grub Stake.”
“Boss Tolley is no pleasant citizen and his joint is no sweet-scented garden spot, I admit,” Hurley agreed. “Personally I’d like to see Tolley run out of town and the Grub Stake eliminated. But Colorado Brown has opened a new place and is going to run it right – so he says.”
“That’s what is bringing me back,” Nell confessed. “He got word to me by Mother Tubbs, and he made me a better offer than Tolley ever would. But I expect one cabaret is about like another in these roughneck towns.”
“I don’t know about that,” the man said defensively. “We mean to try to clean up Canyon Pass. The boys have got to have amusement. Colorado Brown is a white man, and, if he gets the backing of the better element, he can give a good show and sell better hootch and better grub than ever Boss Tolley dared to.”
“Hootch is hootch,” Nell interrupted. “It’s all bad. There’s nothing good about a rotten egg, Mr. Hurley. And the men’s money is wasted in all those places – plumb wasted!”
He had been watching her closely as they talked. He had been watching Nell closely, off and on, for several years. Like many of the other young and unattached men of Canyon Pass, Joe Hurley had at one time attempted to storm the fortress of Nell Blossom’s heart. Finally he had become convinced that the girl was not for him.
Joe Hurley neither wore his heart on his sleeve nor was he unwise enough to anger Nell by forcing his attentions beyond that barrier she had raised between them. His were merely the objections of any clean-minded man when he had seen her yielding to the machinations of Dick the Devil. Joe knew the gambler’s kind.
He had felt no little anxiety when, with the usual spring exodus of the two old desert rats, Steve Siebert and Andy McCann, Nell and Dick Beckworth had likewise disappeared from the Grub Stake. Dick, of course, had settled with Boss Tolley; he intimated that he was starting north for the railroad at Crescent City. The hour had been so early that nobody else had chanced to see the gambler and the girl ride away. Nell was missed later, and all the right thinking men of the town, although they said little, feared the worst for Nell Blossom.
Nell had displayed at the last some little interest in Dick the Devil. The other girls at the Grub Stake gossiped about it.
Then came Mother Tubbs with a bona-fide letter from the girl to dam the flood of gossip. Nell was working as usual in a cabaret. She had left Boss Tolley because she could not stand him any longer. She was bitter about the Grub Stake and its proprietor. And not a word in the letter about Dick Beckworth. It was plain, even to the most suspicious, that Dick had not gone with her after all.
These few facts colored Joe Hurley’s thoughts as they rode along the track. What colored Nell’s?
When the sprightly talk lapsed between them, the girl’s face fell into unhappy lines. She who had been as blithe as a field lark all her life was showing to Joe Hurley for the first time a most unnatural soberness of spirit. Her eyes, their gaze fixed straight ahead, were filmed with remoteness that his friendly glance could not penetrate.
Something had changed Nell Blossom. She was no longer the happy-go-lucky girl she had been heretofore. He wondered if, after all, her affair with Dick Beckworth was serious.
They skirted the Overhang, their horses now at a canter. Nell suddenly pulled in her mount at a place where a patch along the brink of the treacherous cap had recently crumbled.
“Looks as if there might have been a small slide,” observed Hurley cheerfully.
“Was – was anybody hurt?”
“Reckon not. Just about where the big slide was years ago. There are always bits dropping down this cliff. I tell ’em there’s bound to be another landslip some time that will play hob with Runaway River and maybe flood out the town again. It’s like living over a volcano.”
Nell still looked back at the broken edge of the cliff. “Nobody missing, then? Nobody – er – left town?”
He laughed. “Nobody but you and old Steve and Andy McCann. Those old desert rats lit out the same morning you left town. Hold on! I don’t know as you know it; but Dick Beckworth went about that time. He’s gone to Denver, so Tolley says, to deal faro at a big place there.”
He could not see the girl’s face. As far as he knew the statement made no impression upon her. They jogged on practically in silence until they came to the point where the wagon-track plunged steeply to the ford of the West Fork, and from which spot the squalid town was first visible.
“Ugh!” Nell shuddered and glanced at Joe again. “It is such an ugly place.”
“Where’s your civic pride, Nell?” and the other chuckled.
“What is there to be proud of?” was her sharp demand.
“It’s a money-making town.”
“Money!”
“Quite a necessary evil, that same money,” he rejoined. “Gold is a good foundation to build a town upon. Canyon Pass has ‘got a future in front of it,’ as the feller said. Business is booming. Bank deposits are increasing. Three families have bought piano-players, and there are at least a dozen talking machines in town – besides the female citizens,” and he laughed again.
“All that?” in a sneering tone. “Still, the bulk of the wages from the mines and washings are spent for drink and in gambling. The increase in bank deposits I bet are made by the merchants and honkytonk keepers, Mr. Hurley. Canyon Pass is prosperous – yes. But at the expense of everything decent and everybody’s decency. Mother Tubbs has got it right. Canyon Pass hasn’t got a heart.”
“Oh – heart!”
“Yes, heart. There’s neither law nor gospel, she says. Only such law as is enforced at the muzzle of the sheriff’s gun. And as far as religion goes – when was there ever a parson in Canyon Pass?”
“They’re rare birds, I admit. But you needn’t blame me, Nell.”
“I do blame you!” she exclaimed fiercely. “You’re at fault – you, and Slickpenny Norris who runs the bank, and Bill Judson of the Three Star, and the manager of the Oreode Company, and the other more influential men. It is your fault that there isn’t a church and other civilized things in Canyon Pass.”
“Great saltpeter, Nell! You’re not wailing for a Sunday School and a sky pilot?”
“Me? I reckon not!” She almost spat out the scornful denial. “I’m just telling you what your old Canyon Pass is. It’s a back number. But I’m free to confess if a parson and a crew of psalm-singing tenderfoots came here, I’d like enough pull my freight again – and that time for keeps! Even Hoskins would be more endurable.”
At this outburst Joe Hurley broke into laughter. Nell Blossom was paradoxical – had always been.
And yet, what Nell had said about the shortcomings of Canyon Pass stuck in Joe Hurley’s mind. Within a few days the thought, fermenting within him, resulted in that letter which had so interested – not to say excited – the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt in far-away Ditson Corners.
“No, there ain’t no news – no news a-tall,” declared Mrs. Sam Tubbs, comfortably rocking. “Nothing ever happens in Canyon Pass. For a right busy town on its main street, there’s less happens in the back alleys than in any camp I ever seen – and I seen a-plenty.
“It’s in the back alleys o’ life, Nell, that the interesting things happen. Folks buy and sell, and argue and scheme, and otherwise play the fool out on the main streets. But in the alleys babies is born, and people die, and boys and gals make love and marry. Them’s the re’lly interesting things in life.”
“Ugh! Love and marriage! They are the biggest fool things the world knows anything about.”
Mother Tubbs chuckled. It was an unctuous chuckle. It shook her great body like a violent explosion in a jelly-bag and made the wide-armed rocking-chair she sat in creak.
“Sho!” she said. “I’ve heard seventeen-year-old gals say as much ’fore now, who dandled their second young-un on their knee ’fore they was twenty. The things we’re least sure of in this world is love and marriage. Lightning ain’t nothin’ to ’em – nothin’!
“Now, there’s Mr. Joe Hurley – ”
Nell started, turned on the top step of the Tubbs’ back porch, and looked searchingly at the old woman with a frown on her brow.
“Now, there’s Mr. Joe Hurley,” pursued Mother Tubbs placidly. “There ain’t a thing the matter with that man but that he needs a wife.”
“Why doesn’t he take one, then?” demanded Nell wickedly. “There are plenty of them around here whose husbands don’t seem to care anything about them.”
“Like me and my Sam, heh?” put forth Mother Tubbs, still amused. “But I reckon if Mr. Joe Hurley, or any other man, should attempt to run away with me, Sam would go gunning for him. What they call the ‘first law of Nater’ – which is the sense of possession, not self-preservation – would probably get to working in Sam’s mind.
“He’d get to thinking of my flapjacks and chicken-with-fixin’s and his bile would rise ’gainst the man – no matter who – who was enjoying them victuals.
“Oh, yes. Not only is the way to a man’s heart through his stomach; but believe me, Nell, most men are like those people the Bible speaks of ‘whose god is their stomach.’”
“Does the Bible say that, Mother Tubbs?” broke in the girl.
“Somethin’ near to it.”
“Then there is some sense in the Bible, isn’t there?”
“Hush-er-you, Nell Blossom!” ejaculated the old woman sternly. “Does seem awful that you’re such a heathen. The Bible’s plumb full of good advice, and lovely stories, and sweet truths. I used to read it a lot before I broke my specs. But I remember lots that I read, thanks be.”
“I don’t care for stories,” said the girl crossly. “And I don’t know that I believe there is a heaven,” she went on quickly. “Once you are dead I reckon that’s all there is to it. I won’t learn any more songs about heaven. I used to cry over them – and about folks dying. I remember the first song Dad taught me to sing in the saloons. It used to make me cry when I came to the verse:
Last night as I lay on my pillow —
Last night as I lay on my bed —
Last night as I lay on my pillow,
I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead.
Bring back! Oh, bring back!
Bring back my Bonnie to me, to me —
It’s all stuff and nonsense!” she broke off with confidence.
“That ain’t a hymn,” said Mother Tubbs placidly. “Hymns is different, Nell. A good, uplifting hymn like ‘Am I a Soldier of the Cross,’ or ‘Beulah Land,’ takes you right out of yourself – bears your heart up on wings o’ hope and helps you forget you’re only a poor, miserable worm – ”
“I’m not a worm!” interrupted Nell with vigor. “I’m as good as anybody – as good as anybody in Canyon Pass, anyway, even if some of these women do look down on me.”
“Of course you are, Nell. ‘Worm’ is just a manner o’ speaking.”
“Dad trained me to sing in these saloons, I know,” went on the girl quickly, angrily, “because he was too weakly to use a pick and shovel. We had to eat, and he thought he had to have drink. So I had to earn it. But I’ve been a good girl.”
“I never doubted it, Nell,” Mother Tubbs hastened to say. “Nobody could doubt it that knowed you as well as I do.” She let her gaze wander over the squalid back yards of the row of shacks of which the Tubbs’ domicile was no better than its neighbors. “They don’t know you like I do, Nell. You’ve lived with me for three years – all the time you was growing into a woman, as ye might say. You hafter do what you do, and I don’t ’low when we are forced into a job, no matter what it is, that it’s counted against us as a sin.”
Nell flashed the placid old woman another glance. There was something hidden behind that look – of late there was something secretive in all Nell Blossom said or did. Did Mother Tubbs understand that this was so? Was she, in her rude but kindly way, offering a sympathy that she feared to put into audible speech for fear of offending the proud girl?
The latter suddenly laughed, but it was not the songbird’s note her voice expressed. There was something harsh – something scornful – in it.
“I reckon I could get away with murder, and you’d say I was all right, Mother Tubbs,” she declared.
“Well, mebbe,” the old woman admitted, her eyes twinkling.
“Suppose – ” said Nell slowly, her face turned away again, “suppose a party was the cause of another’s death – even if he deserved it – but didn’t mean just that – suppose, anyway, what you did caused a man’s death, for whatever reason, although unintended? Would it be a sin, Mother Tubbs?”
She might have been reflecting upon a quite casual supposition for all her tone and manner betrayed. Just how wise Mother Tubbs was – just how far-seeing – no human soul could know. The old woman had seen much and learned much during her long journey through a very rough and wicked world.
“I tell you, Nell,” Mother Tubbs observed, “it’s all according to what’s in our hearts, I reckon. If what we done caused a party to die, and we had death in our heart when we done the thing that killed him, I reckon it would be a sin. No getting around that. For we can’t take God’s duties into our hands and punish even the wickedest man with death – like we’d crunch a black beetle under our bootsole. ‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’” She repeated the phrase with reverence. “No, sin is sin. And because a party deserves to be killed, in our opinion, don’t excuse our killing him.”
Nell was quite still for a minute. Then she shrugged her shoulders.
“Humph!” she said briskly. “I don’t think much of your religion, Mother Tubbs. No, I don’t.”
Mother Tubbs began to croon:
It’s the old-style religion,
The old-style religion,
The old-style religion,
That gets you on your way.
’Twas good enough for Moses,
Good enough for Moses —
The old-style religion,
That gets you on your way.
“It ain’t no new-fangled religion, Nell. But it’s comforting – ”
“It wouldn’t comfort me none,” answered the girl. “I reckon it ain’t religion – and a sky pilot – that Canyon Pass needs after all. If we’d just run about fifty of these tramps out of town – and Boss Tolley and his gang – we could get along without psalm-singing and such flubdubbery.”
“You ain’t talking like you used to, Nell,” said the old woman, observing her curiously.
“I hadn’t thought so much about it. Religion is too soft. These roughnecks would ride right over a parson and – and that kind. Now, wouldn’t they?”
“Not altogether. I expect they’d try – at first. But if a man had enough grace in him, he’d stand up against ’em.”
“He’d better have backbone.”
“Same thing,” chuckled Mother Tubbs. “Same thing. It takes the grace of God to stiffen a man’s backbone – I tell you true. I hope this parson Mr. Joe Hurley talks about has got plenty of grace.”
“Who – what?” gasped the girl. “What parson?”
“Well, now! That is a gob o’ news. But I thought you must o’ heard it – over to Colorado Brown’s, or somewhere – the way you was talkin’. This parson is a friend of Mr. Joe Hurley, and he wants to get him out yere.”
“From the East?”
“Yeppy. Mr. Joe says he went to school with him. And he’s some preacher.”
“What do you think o’ that!” ejaculated Nell. “Mr. Hurley didn’t say anything to me about it the day we rode into the Pass together.”
“I reckon not. This has all been hatched up since then.”
“But, Mother Tubbs!” cried the girl. “You don’t expect any tenderfoot parson can come in here and make over Canyon Pass?”
“I reckon not. We folks have got to make ourselves over. But we need a leader – we need a Shower of the Way. We’ve lost our eyesight – the best of us – when it comes to seeing God’s ways. My soul! I couldn’t even raise a prayer in conference meeting no more. But I used to go reg’lar when I was a gal – played the melodeon – led the singin’ – and often got down on my knees in public and raised a prayer.”
“Humph!” scoffed the girl. “If God answered prayer, I bet you prayed over Sam enough to have cured him of getting drunk forty times over!”
“I don’t know – I don’t know,” returned Mother Tubbs thoughtfully. “I been thinking lately that, mebbe when I was praying to God to save Sam from his sins, I was cursing Sam for his meanness! I ain’t got as sweet a disposition as I might have, Nell.”
“Oh, yes you have, Mother Tubbs!” exclaimed Nell, and suddenly jumped up to kiss the old woman warmly. “You’re a dear, sweet old thing!”
“Well, now,” rejoined Mother Tubbs complacently, “I ought to purr like any old tabby-cat for that.”
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